9780241562635

The Penguin Book of Bengali Short Stories

Edited by Arunava Sinha

The Penguin Book of Bengali Short Stories

THE PENGUIN BOOK of BENGALI SHORT STORIES

Translated and edited by ARUNAVA

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This selection first published in Penguin Classics 2024 001

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Introduction

I will go out on a limb and claim that the short story is the brightest jewel of Bengali literature. Nurtured by a profusion of magazines, Sunday newspaper supplements and innumerable literary journals throughout the twentieth century, and read avidly by millions with virtually no other form of quick entertainment available, the short story tells the many stories of Bengali literature like no other literary form can.

And yet the irony is that it is Bengali novels that people remember. Perhaps this is true of all languages – many classic novels are etched permanently in the collective memory of readers, but there is no such collective memory for short fiction, except for a handful of stories. I will now go back out on that same limb and state that Bengali short stories are living testimony to the injustice of this act of remembering and forgetting, remembering and misremembering.

The Bengali language is spoken and read by some 250 million people, largely in two countries – the Indian state of West Bengal and the country of Bangladesh. Both these regions were part of the original province of Bengal, albeit with fluid boundaries, even before the advent of British colonization in India. The spoken and the written language had evolved over the centuries from one of the offshoots of the ancient tongue of Sanskrit. By the time the East India Company and then the British Crown took over the administration of Bengal – and, gradually, other parts of India – the Bengali language was much closer to its current versions. With the coming of the printing press in Bengal in the second half of the eighteenth century, the language gradually acquired a standard version – with, of course, a fair amount of regional diversity in the vocabulary – that became the one in which literature began to be produced. This, with some evolution, is the version that has persisted.

As with most of the literatures of India, Bengali literature also began in oral form, which in turn meant that verse was the primary medium.

Introduction

When writers finally discovered the possibilities of prose in the nineteenth century there was, inevitably, an explosion of writing of all kinds. It was from this sudden expansion of possibilities that Bengali fiction emerged, both in the form of the novel and, a little later, the short story. These forms were taken from the West, due to the spread of English literature in Bengal, channelled by the British rulers who had made Calcutta, the present-day capital of West Bengal, the capital city of their Indian colony.

Starting in the late nineteenth century, the short story in particular found millions of readers over the next decades. There was a large literate readership in Bengal, thanks to the growth of education during and after the period referred to as the Bengal Renaissance. Given this demand, Bengali fiction writers wrote short stories with a ferocious energy, creating in the process a steady stream of make-believe, and yet starkly real, experiences that their readers willingly became a part of.

Bengali fiction has always been written in a time of turmoil. It is hard to identify even a single period of relative calm in the social and political history of Bengali-speaking people in India and, subsequently, erstwhile East Pakistan and Bangladesh. By the time the first short stories appeared, India in general, and Bengal in particular, were already in the throes of the freedom movement demanding the withdrawal of British colonizers and the right to self-rule. In Bengal this took a particularly violent form, as hot-blooded young crusaders decided that bombs and guns were the way to frighten the British into leaving. Gandhi’s non-violent movement was still in the future, and there was both a romantic and a heroic appeal in the possibility of wreaking havoc within the orderly administration of the British. The ‘Swadeshi’ movement also tried to wage economic warfare by demanding the boycott of British goods in favour of home-grown ones – which were, ironically, a luxury, for the latter were far more expensive than the former, making the cause accessible only to the relatively rich. These themes were reflected in the Bengali fiction of the time, most notably in some of the works of Rabindranath Tagore 1861–1941 who was to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, and, before him, in the writings of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (1838–94), whose historical novel Durgeshnandini (1865) is considered to be the first Bengali novel. However, there were other manifestations of turmoil that society was

being forced to confront. There was the continued exploitation of the landless by feudal landowners, with the former having to suffer terribly in both physical and mental terms. A political movement for their rights lay several decades in the future. Added to this was the ruthless demonstration of hierarchy in India’s complex caste system, with the so-called upper-caste people grinding down the members of the so-called lower caste with claims of quasi-divinity, power and entitlement. All of these themes featured prominently in the stories written in the hope of seeing social change.

Patriarchy continued to rule in vicious forms. Even though the relentless efforts of nineteenth-century social reformers like Rammohun Roy (1774–1833) had led to the outlawing of the practice of sati – where a woman joined her husband on his funeral pyre – and the introduction of the facility of remarriage for widows, education for women, and a raising of the minimum age of marriage – championed by another reformer, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar (1820–91) – these changes evoked, quite literally, howls of protest from the orthodox. Before the second half of the nineteenth century, it was common practice for parents to get their daughters married soon after they turned eight – women still enjoyed very few rights and almost no freedom. The only exceptions were those whose fathers or husbands were enlightened, but there again it was the decision of men. Thus the genuine plight of women became the subject of much of fiction, with a number of stories bringing out the hidden desires, aspirations and frustrations of women in domestic spaces, both urban and rural, enabling half their readers to see the concealed elements of their lives reflected in these stories. Not surprisingly, they gained a huge following, especially among women readers who, confined to their homes for all intents and purposes, could only live through the lives of fictional characters.

It would be no exaggeration to state that all these forms of social injustice and inequity became the staple of much of Bengali fiction at the time. Short-story writers in particular wove their tales with the threads of real life around them. The trajectory of the characters in these stories, whether they led to hope or despair, was representative of a brutal reality. These characters are almost always victims of one or more forms of oppression, with the oppressors also getting considerable play. Some writers fused these narratives with the psychology of individuals, but up until the 1920s

or so Bengali fiction was clearly intent on depicting social reality. There was really no way to avoid or escape this, nor would it have been moral to do so, since the grimness of daily existence was a palpable presence in most people’s lives.

In 1905, the British decided that the political resistance was getting too hot to handle in Bengal and the protesters had to be divided. The British government of India announced that the province was going to be partitioned along religious lines, with a separate region being created for those areas where Muslims were the dominant population, leaving the rest for the Hindu majority. This rehearsal of the Partition of India, which took place when it eventually gained independence in 1947, was not met with approval. There was vigorous and violent opposition and the writing was on the wall quite early on, but the colonizers held out till 1912 before giving in and announcing the reunification of Bengal. While this temporary separation asserted the unity of the Bengali identity in some ways, much of it thanks to powerful cultural statements made by writers and artists, it also underscored the nascent fault lines between the two major religions of Bengal, Hinduism and Islam. Caste was already a strong divider, and religion now joined it, with a single Bengali word, jaat, being used to combine both religion and caste and partition people into separate groups – based on caste among Hindus, and on religion between Hindus and Muslims – where each considered the rest ‘the other’. Alert to this development, many writers began to explore its impact on individual lives through their fiction.

A year before the reunification, the British government of India shifted the capital from Calcutta, on the eastern side of the country, to Delhi, which is located more centrally in terms of longitude if not latitude. With the rulers of the country no longer as invested in the development of Calcutta and its surroundings, economic changes started to take place in the region, as the engines of business and commerce – and the resultant prosperity for many, though by no means all, in Bengal – began to move to other parts of the country, closer to the seat of government. In any case, Bombay and the western part of India were also becoming mercantile powers in their own right. This inequality would lead to economic despair and the resultant pushback in disruptive forms soon after the country gained independence in 1947.

Introduction

The intellectual domains of the sciences, the arts and culture flourished in Bengal in the early decades of the twentieth century, thanks in no small measure to the Western education that the British had brought to the region. The latest ideas in philosophy, art, physics, biology, medicine and, above all, literature all made their way to Calcutta. By virtue of being the capital for many decades, Calcutta had consolidated its importance in Bengal in a manner that has lasted ever since, even after the Partition, when Dhaka became the most important city in East Pakistan and, later, the capital of Bangladesh. As a result, writers from all over Bengal gravitated towards Calcutta sooner or later. Even if they didn’t necessarily spend their entire lives there – some of them preferred to write in rural or semirural surroundings – their works were almost entirely published in Calcutta in magazines and books.

Soaking in ideas from elsewhere, many thinking women and men adopted the ideals of socialism and, subsequently, Marxism. Viewing the world around them through these lenses, a number of writers interpreted the misery of the masses in Marxist terms in their fiction. Like their predecessors, they too wrote about the oppressed, but their stories offered narratives not so much of human oppression as of the tyranny of a system whose effects on humans were to be seen in uncompromisingly raw storytelling that pulled no punches.

In the 1940s, even as Independence, the Partition and the riots associated with them began to loom, Bengal faced one of the worst-ever crises in its history when a famine in the state, artificially engineered by the British, led to millions starving to death, even though there was no overall shortfall of grain. The famine led people to beg, steal and even kill for food. Ever since then, food, hunger and, of course, social injustice have been the leitmotifs of many works of Bengali fiction, with the theme taking on increasingly symbolic overtones.

The 1940s were a truly turbulent decade for Bengal. There was widespread fear of a Japanese invasion as the Second World War spread to the east. Japanese planes bombed Calcutta in December 1942 and in December 1943. There was panic, mass evacuation and a shortage of all essential commodities, leading to chaos in daily life. In between these two attacks came the famine. And barely had these subsided when violent riots broke out across Bengal between Hindus and Muslims, Calcutta being badly affected.

Introduction

The riots drove a spiteful wedge between the two communities and sealed the decision to partition India on the eastern as well as the western front. Most of the districts of Bengal where Muslims were in the majority were allotted to the newly formed country of Pakistan – more specifically, to East Pakistan, for independent Pakistan comprised two segments, to the west of independent India and within the eastern part of independent India respectively.

Independence and Partition saw one of the largest movements ever of people across international borders. These borders were drawn by the British government of India before leaving India. Many of the Muslims whose homes were in the regions allotted to India decided to move to West or East Pakistan, whichever was nearer. And many of the Hindus whose homes were in areas given to Pakistan chose to settle in independent India. In Bengal, along with the Indian state of Punjab, as well as in Pakistan, this naturally led to a huge influx of people who came to be known as refugees. Bengali was now the language spoken by almost everyone in East Pakistan as well as the newly formed Indian state of West Bengal – the part of the original Bengal that had been allocated to India. The trauma of having to leave one’s home and settle in what was now a new country – even if the cultural affinities were strong – naturally became the subject of a great deal of Bengali fiction, art and cinema. The stories didn’t so much capture the process of the migration as they did its aftereffects on the everyday lives of their characters on both sides of the new international border.

A new upheaval began in East Pakistan soon after its formation. The people here complained about the attempts of the Pakistani government in West Pakistan to impose Urdu as the official language of Bengalispeaking people in East Pakistan. The Bhasha Andolon – the movement for Bengali – erupted in Dhaka soon after the formation of Pakistan in 1947. On 21 February 1952 there was a crackdown by the Pakistan military on planned protests in Dhaka, which were led by college students, in which several young men were killed. The date of the killings has been memorialized among Bengali-speaking people since then, and it was later adopted by the United Nations as International Mother Tongue Day. This movement gathered pace through the 1960s, eventually culminating in a liberation movement and, finally, the liberation war that saw the emergence

Introduction

of the independent country of Bangladesh – the name comes from the language, which is known as Bangla among those who speak it – in 1971. The war for freedom against Pakistan was in fact won with the help of the Indian Army; India and Pakistan had by then become bitter enemies, having fought their own war in 1965. Much of Bengali literature in East Pakistan and, subsequently, Bangladesh adopted as its principal themes the liberation war, independence from Pakistan and violent postindependence politics during the 1970s. In this wave of violence even Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (1920–75), considered the architect of the independence of Bangladesh, and its first president, was assassinated along with his family by a group of Bangladesh army officers in 1975. The trauma of this event has been a recurring subject of writings from Bangladesh.

At the same time, in West Bengal fiction writers were evolving new literary styles for themselves – moving away from traditional storytelling to explore language and its possibilities more freely, much as was being done in the West – and confronting the new realities of the rise of a violent ultra-left movement known as Naxalism. This also led to the most openly political work seen in the annals of Bengali fiction, as a number of writers examined the violence and the doomed ideology behind it through a critical and creative lens. Many of them expressed their support for the movement and used their stories to depict, dramatize and despair of the human tragedies of this time in explosive and unconventional language.

Perhaps this long-lasting overdose of social and political turmoil delayed the examination of modern-day relationships between people in Bengali fiction. It began in some of the short stories and novels written in the late 1960s and continued into the 1970s, but it wasn’t until the 1980s that the complexities of personal lives and relationships took centrestage; they have continued to inform the fiction written in Bengali on both sides of the border between India and Bangladesh.

If you were to conclude that a collection of Bengali short stories picked from various decades is effectively also a telling of the history of the times, people and places from which these stories come, you wouldn’t be wrong. And yet, of course, the stories here are far more than history – either of the land and the people or of Bengali literature. As with any literature, they are individual, unique dialogues between the writers and the world

Introduction

they perceived, the world they dreamt of and even the world they abhorred. The ‘Bengaliness’ of these stories is not in-your-face. They are not works of ethnography masquerading as fiction, nor clever guides to those who want to know more about Bengali-speaking people and their universes.

After all, these stories were written in Bengali for family, friends, neighbours and fellow inhabitants of the worlds they depict. They were meant to be not doors through which to enter an unfamiliar world, but windows through which to gaze into a familiar world brought afresh to readers. They don’t represent Bengal, they represent only these particular writers’ work at the time that they were written. And yet you may find, dear reader, a thread – or a dozen – that seems to bind them together. It might be something as simple as longing for what is not, or a suppressed anger about the world being the way it is, or a confession that human existence is too peculiar to be understood and can only be acknowledged and recorded – it might be all of these, and other things as well.

There is no science to the choice here, no cast-iron logical framework, no effort to be representative, no literary justification. Call this collection, if you will, the personal choice of someone who found these stories worthy of full-bodied reading – with mind, heart, muscles, organs, imagination, ecstasy, melancholy, love . . . everything that a human being is capable of bringing to reading a short story and adoring it. I thank you for holding this book in your hands. Dhonnobaad.

RABINDRANATH TAGORE

Dead or Alive

The widowed daughter-in-law of Sharadashankar, the zamindar of Ranihat, had no family of her own on her father’s side; one by one, all of them had died. She had no one to speak of on her husband’s side either –  neither husband nor son. Her elder brother-in-law’s youngest son was the apple of her eye. His mother had been severely ill for a long time after giving birth to him, which was why his widowed aunt Kadambini –  whom he addressed as Kakima – had brought him up. Rearing someone else’s child seems to strengthen the bond, for one has no right over the child; there are no social demands, only the demands of love – but unalloyed love cannot cite any documentary evidence to establish its right, nor does it wish to. It only adores the uncertain object of its affection twice as fervently.

After she had showered all the suppressed love of the widow on the little boy, Kadambini died unexpectedly one monsoon night. For some unknown reason her heart stopped beating suddenly; everything else in the world continued to function as before, but only the spring in her tiny, tender heart – ever thirsty for love – stopped working forever.

To avoid the unwelcome intrusion of the police, four Brahmin employees of the zamindar proceeded to cremate the body without any delay.

The crematorium in Ranihat was a long way from any habitation. The enormous burning ground was completely bare, except for a hut next to the lake and, close by, a huge banyan tree. A river used to flow here in the past, but it had completely dried up now. A section of the dried riverbed had been dug up to create the lake. People hereabouts considered the lake a legitimate representative of the river in full flow.

Placing the corpse inside the hut, the four of them awaited the arrival of the wood for the pyre. It was taking so long that Nitai and Gurucharan went off to enquire about the delay, while Bidhu and Banamali stayed back to guard the corpse.

It was a dark monsoon night. The sky was overcast, not a star was visible; the pair waited in silence in the darkness of the hut. One of them had a box of matches and a lamp. But despite all their efforts the dampness prevented the matches from being lit and the lantern they had brought had died long ago.

After a long silence, one of them said, ‘I’m dying for a smoke. We came away in such a hurry that I forgot to bring any along.’

‘I can get some at once,’ offered his companion.

Sensing Banamali’s desire to flee, Bidhu exclaimed, ‘Really! And I suppose I’m expected to wait here alone, am I?’

The conversation ended. Every minute seemed like an hour. The pair that had stayed back cursed the pair who had supposedly gone off in search of wood – every passing moment deepened their suspicion that the other two were having a cosy smoke and chat somewhere.

There were no sounds to be heard besides the constant chirping of crickets and the croaking of frogs from the lake. Suddenly the bed appeared to shake, as though the corpse was turning over on its side.

Bidhu and Banamali began to tremble and muttered prayers. A sigh was heard inside the hut. Bidhu and Banamali leapt out of the room in an instant and raced off towards their village.

Nearly three miles away, they ran into the rest of their party, who were returning with lanterns. They had in fact stopped for a smoke, and had not done anything about the wood. Still, they informed the other two that the wood was being chopped and would be despatched shortly. Whereupon Bidhu and Banamali proceeded to describe all that had taken place in the hut. Dismissing their account in disbelief, Nitai and Gurucharan reproached them angrily.

Without further ado, all four of them returned to the hut at the burning ground. Entering, they discovered the bed empty and the corpse missing.

They exchanged glances. What if a jackal had dragged the corpse away? But even the sheet covering her was missing. Investigating, they spotted a woman’s small footprints, fresh in the mud gathered outside the door.

Sharadashankar was not an easy man to deal with, and telling him this ghost story was unlikely to yield dividends. After prolonged discussions, the quartet concluded that it would be best to inform the zamindar that the cremation had been completed.

Those who finally brought the wood for the pyre at dawn were told that because of the delay the body had been burnt already, using some wood kept in the hut. No one was likely to be suspicious about this –  a corpse was not a valuable object for anyone to steal. 2

As everyone knows, even when there are no signs of life in a person, sometimes life still persists, and the body resumes its normal functioning at the appropriate time. Kadambini had not died either; only her vital signs had stopped for some reason.

When she regained her senses, she found herself enveloped in darkness. It seemed this was not the place where she normally slept. ‘Didi,’ she called out, but no one answered in the dark room. Sitting up in fear, she recollected her experience of dying. The sudden pain in her chest, the inability to breathe. Her sister-in-law had been warming the milk for Khoka –  her son –  on a fire; unable to stay on her feet any more, Kadambini had tumbled on to the bed and in a choked voice said, ‘Didi, ask Khoka to come to me, I am dying.’ Then everything grew dark, like a bottle of ink overturned on a sheet of paper covered in writing, and Kadambini’s entire memory and consciousness, every letter in the book of the world, dissipated in an instant. The widow could not remember whether Khoka had addressed her as Kakima one last time in his endearing voice, could not recollect whether she had succeeded in collecting a final allowance of love for her everlasting, alien journey of death from this ever-familiar world.

At first she thought that hell was eternally desolate and eternally dark, just like this – that there was nothing to see there, nothing to hear, nothing to do, that she would only have to stay awake like this till eternity.

But when a cold gust of moisture-laden wind blew in through the door and she heard the croaking of the frogs, all the memories of the rains that

she had amassed since childhood in her brief life condensed in her mind in a single moment, enabling her to feel the touch of the real world. There was a flash of lightning; the lake, the banyan tree, the huge burning ground and a distant row of trees became visible for a moment. She recalled bathing in this lake on auspicious dates, and how horrifying death had seemed at the sight of corpses here.

Her first thought was to go back home. But, she reflected the very next moment, why will they take me back since I am not alive any more? It will be bad luck for them. I have been exiled from the kingdom of the living, after all. I am my own dead spirit.

If that were not so, how could she have arrived here at this desolate crematorium from Sharadashankar’s well-protected ladies’ chambers? If she had not been cremated yet, where were the people who had come to cremate her body? Her last memory was of the final moments of her death in Sharadashankar’s well-lit residence. Discovering herself alone the very next moment on this distant, barren, dark burning ground, she realized: I am no longer a member of the human tribe on this planet; I am dangerous, a harbinger of ill fortune, I am my dead spirit.

As soon as she was struck by this thought, the rules that bound her to the world seemed to melt away. She felt possessed by extraordinary power, infinite freedom –  as though she could go where she liked, do as she pleased. Driven into a frenzy by this unprecedented new ability, she swept out of the hut like a sudden gust of wind and walked across the burning ground without a trace of diffidence, fear or concern in her heart.

As she marched on, her footsteps faltered, her body weakened. The fields and meadows just wouldn’t end – they were interspersed with paddy fields, some of them knee-deep in water. When the first light of dawn became visible, a bird or two could be heard from a bamboo grove located near a cluster of houses not too far away.

Now she felt a kind of trepidation. She did not know where her relationship with the world and the people who inhabited it stood. As long as she had been at the crematorium, in the fields, in the darkness of the monsoon night, she had been unafraid, as though in her own world. In daylight, the settlement seemed a treacherous place. Humans fear ghosts, ghosts fear humans too, they occupy opposite banks of the river of death.

Her mud-spattered clothes, the strange state of her mind and the unhinged demeanour brought on by a sleepless night had transformed Kadambini’s appearance to one that would have made people afraid and young boys pelt stones at her from a distance. Fortunately, the first person to see her in this state was a gentleman travelling on that road.

‘You seem to be from a genteel family,’ he said to her. ‘Where are you going in this condition all by yourself?’

At first Kadambini looked at him without responding. She could not summon an answer quickly. That she was still in this world, that she looked like a gentlewoman, that a passer-by on the village road was asking her a question, seemed unbelievable.

‘Let me take you home,’ the passer-by said to her again. ‘Tell me where you live.’

Kadambini considered what her reply should be. She could not entertain thoughts of returning to her in-laws’ home, and she had no home of her own – suddenly she remembered a childhood friend of hers.

Although they had been separated as children, her friend Jogomaya and she still wrote to each other now and then. At times this escalated into a fully fledged war of love. Kadambini attempted to convey that hers was the stronger emotion, while Jogomaya insinuated that Kadambini did not reciprocate her sentiments adequately. Neither of them harboured the slightest doubt that, if only some miracle were to bring them together, they would be unable to let each other out of their sight even for an instant.

‘I want to go to Sripaticharan-babu’s house in Nishchindapur,’ Kadambini told the gentleman.

The traveller was on his way to Calcutta; although it was not near, Nishchindapur was on the way. He personally escorted Kadambini to Sripaticharan-babu’s house.

The friends were reunited. It took a few moments for them to recognize each other, but the resemblance to their respective childhood selves soon became obvious to both.

‘How fortunate I am!’ exclaimed Jogomaya. ‘I had never expected to set

eyes on you in my lifetime. But how did you happen to visit me, my dear? How did your in-laws let you go?’

After a pause, Kadambini said, ‘Do not ask me about my in-laws, my dear. Let me live like a maid in one corner of your house, I will perform all your household tasks.’

‘What do you mean?’ responded Jogomaya. ‘Why should you live like a maid? You are my friend, you are my . . .’ et cetera.

Sripati entered. After a brief gaze at him, Kadambini left slowly – neither covering her head with the end of her sari in a show of respect, nor displaying any sign of diffidence or uncertainty.

Jogomaya quickly began to explain to Sripati, lest he think badly of her friend. But so few explanations were required, and Sripati approved of every one of her proposals so easily, that Jogomaya was not particularly satisfied.

Kadambini had come to her friend’s house, but she could not feel close to her friend –  death was a gulf between them. Constant self-awareness and doubts about oneself made socializing impossible. Kadambini would gaze at Jogomaya, her thoughts drifting; she felt as though her friend occupied a distant planet with her husband and household. With all her love and tenderness and responsibilities, she is an inhabitant of the world, while I am nothing but an empty shadow. She is in the realm of existence and I am in the universe of the infinite.

Jogomaya, too, found all this strange, but she could fathom none of it. Womankind cannot tolerate mystery –  for you can make poetry with uncertainty, you can be valorous with it, but you cannot live in a household with it. That is why women either eliminate the very existence of what they cannot understand, maintaining no relationship with it, or else they convert it with their own hands into a new form where they can put it to some use. If they can do neither, they become exceedingly angry with it.

The more obscure Kadambini’s behaviour seemed to become, the angrier Jogomaya got with her. What kind of menace is this that has descended on me, she reflected.

There was another problem. Kadambini was afraid of herself. She simply could not run away from herself. Those who are afraid of ghosts fear their own backs – they are terrified of whatever they cannot keep an

eye on. But Kadambini’s biggest fear lay within herself, she was not afraid of the external world.

That was why she would scream sometimes alone in her room in the middle of the afternoon. In the evening, she would tremble on spotting her own shadow in the lamplight.

Her fear made everyone in the house afraid too. The maids, the servants and even Jogomaya herself began to see ghosts everywhere, at all hours.

One night, Kadambini ran sobbing from her own room all the way to Jogomaya’s, saying, ‘I beg of you, didi, don’t let me be alone.’

Jogomaya was as angry as she was scared. She felt an impulse to throw Kadambini out of her home at once. A compassionate Sripati calmed her down with a great deal of effort and let Kadambini occupy the room next to theirs.

The next day, Sripati was summoned to the ladies’ chambers at an unusual hour. Turning on him unexpectedly, Jogomaya said, ‘What kind of man are you! A woman leaves her own in-laws’ home and ensconces herself in yours, a month goes by and she shows no sign of budging, and I don’t hear a word of protest from you! Please explain what you have in mind. All you men are the same.’

Men indeed have a natural bias in favour of women, and women hold them responsible for this. Even if Sripati had been willing to swear on Jogomaya’s head that his compassion for the helpless yet beautiful Kadambini was not inappropriately great, his behaviour would have proved otherwise.

‘Her in-laws must have tortured the childless widow,’ he mused, ‘and, unable to stand it any more, Kadambini must have arrived here to seek shelter from me. Since she has no parents, how can I abandon her?’ With this thought he had desisted from making any kind of enquiry; nor did he have the inclination to cause Kadambini any pain by asking her questions on this unpleasant subject.

Thereupon his wife proceeded to assault his numbed sense of responsibility. He realized that sending word to Kadambini’s in-laws had become absolutely crucial to the maintenance of domestic harmony. Finally he decided that the outcome of sending an unexpected letter might not be ideal, and that he would make enquiries personally at Ranihat before deciding on a course of action.

While Sripati went off, Jogomaya went to Kadambini to tell her, ‘It isn’t proper for you to stay here any more, my dear. What will people say?’

Looking gravely at Jogomaya, Kadambini said, ‘What do I have to do with people?’

Jogomaya was astonished at this response. ‘You may not, but we do,’ she said in a fit of rage. ‘How can we hold on to the daughter-in-law of another family?’

‘What family am I the daughter-in-law of?’ Kadambini responded.

Oh my god, thought Jogomaya to herself. What does the woman think she’s saying?

‘Do you think I really am one of you?’ Kadambini continued slowly. ‘Do you think I belong to this world? You people laugh, you love, you cry, you live with your own families, I can only watch. You are people, and I am a shadow. I cannot fathom why god has chosen to keep me among you all. You are afraid too, lest I bring misery to your happy lives, and I cannot understand either what relationship I have with all of you. But since the Almighty has not earmarked a place for me, although the ties have been snapped I continue to haunt your lives.’

Because of the way she kept speaking, Jogomaya made some sense of it without grasping the real meaning, but she could neither respond to nor repeat her question. Weighed down with concern, she left.

4

It was almost ten at night when Sripati returned from Ranihat. The world was flooding under torrential rain. The continuous sound suggested that neither the downpour nor the night would end.

‘What did you learn?’ Jogomaya asked.

‘A great deal,’ answered Sripati. ‘We’ll talk about it later.’ He changed his clothes, ate his dinner, had his late-night smoke and went to bed. He looked rather disturbed.

Having suppressed her curiosity for a long time, Jogomaya asked as soon as she got into bed, ‘What did you hear?’

‘You must have made a mistake,’ Sripati responded. Jogomaya was enraged at this. Women never make mistakes, and even

if they did, the duty of wise men was not to refer to them but to accept them as their own. ‘Such as?’ retorted Jogomaya a little hotly.

‘The woman you have given shelter to in your household is not Kadambini,’ declared Sripati.

Such a statement could easily provoke anger, especially when it comes from one’s own husband. ‘So I don’t know my own friend: I have to consult you to identify her – what a thing to say!’

Sripati explained that they could not argue over the nature of his statement, for they had to consider the evidence. There was no doubt that Jogomaya’s childhood friend Kadambini was dead.

‘Listen to you,’ countered Jogomaya. ‘You must have made some mistake. There’s no telling where you’ve really been, what you’ve really heard. Who asked you to go yourself anyway? A letter would have clarified everything.’

Extremely disappointed with his wife’s lack of faith in his efficiency, Sripati proceeded to present detailed evidence –  with no effect. Their arguments ran on into the middle of the night.

Although there was no difference of opinion between husband and wife over throwing Kadambini out of their home this instant – for Sripati was convinced that their guest had deceived his wife all this time under a false identity, while Jogomaya believed that she had abandoned her family –  neither of them was willing to concede the current argument.

As their voices became progressively louder, they forgot that Kadambini was in the very next room.

‘What a predicament,’ said the one. ‘I heard it with my own ears.’

‘Why should I believe you?’ said the other with conviction. ‘I can see her with my own eyes.’

Finally Jogomaya said, ‘Very well, tell me when Kadambini is supposed to have died.’

She assumed that she would be able to find an inconsistency between his date and one of Kadambini’s letters, thus proving her point.

The date that Sripati mentioned turned out, when they had both calculated backwards, to be that of the day before the one on which Kadambini had arrived at their house in the evening. Jogomaya’s heart trembled at this and Sripati began to get an eerie feeling too.

Their door opened suddenly, a gust of rain-laden wind snuffing out the

lamp. The darkness rushed in instantly, filling every inch of space. Kadambini appeared in the middle of the room. It was past two-thirty in the morning, and it was raining incessantly outside.

‘I am the same Kadambini, my dear,’ said Kadambini, ‘but I am not alive any more. I am dead now.’

Jogomaya screamed in terror; Sripati couldn’t utter a word.

‘But what crime have I committed other than dying? If there is no room for me in this world or in the next, where should I go then, tell me?’ Her plaintive cry seemed to awaken the creator, asleep at this hour on this monsoon night, as she asked, ‘Where should I go then, tell me?’

With these words, Kadambini left the couple sleeping in their room to seek her place in the world. 5

It is difficult to explain how Kadambini returned to Ranihat. But she did not show herself to anyone at first, spending the day without food in a ruined temple.

When the monsoon evening descended early, and villagers anxiously took shelter in their own homes in anticipation of the imminent deluge, Kadambini went out on the road. At the threshold of her in-laws’ house she felt a moment of panic, but when she entered, her face covered by the end of her sari, the doormen mistook her for a maid and did not block her way. The rain intensified at this moment, and the wind picked up.

The lady of the house, Sharadashankar’s wife, was playing cards with her husband’s widowed sister. The maid was in the kitchen and an ill Khoka, who had a fever, was sleeping in the bedroom. Evading everyone’s eyes, Kadambini arrived in the bedroom. She did not know herself what impulse had brought her to her in-laws’ house, but she did know that she wanted to set her eyes on the little boy one more time. She had not thought of where she would go, or what would happen thereafter.

In the light of the lamp she saw the sickly little boy sleeping with his hands clenched tightly. The sight made her agitated heart yearn –  how could she live without clasping the child with all his sickness to her bosom once? She pondered, Now that I am gone, who will look after him here?

Dead or Alive

His mother enjoys company, enjoys chatting with people, a game of cards, she was happy all this while entrusting the responsibility for the child to me, she has never had to bear the burden of bringing him up. Who will take care of this boy now?

The little boy turned on his side, saying in his sleep, ‘Water, Kakima.’ Oh my! You haven’t forgotten your Kakima, my darling! Quickly pouring out a glass of water from the pitcher kept in the corner, Kadambini took the child in her arms and gave him his water.

As long as he was under the influence of sleep, the boy was not the least surprised to have his aunt giving him his glass of water. When she had fulfilled her long-cherished desire and tucked him back into bed after kissing him, he woke up. Putting his arms around her, he said, ‘Did you die, Kakima?’

‘Yes, Khoka,’ she replied.

‘You’ve come back to Khoka now? You won’t die again?’ Before she could answer there was a commotion. About to enter the room with a bowl of food for the boy, the maid dropped it with a clatter and collapsed on the floor, exclaiming ‘Oh!’

The lady of the house came running at the sound, her cards forgotten, turning into a block of wood the moment she entered, unable to speak or to make her escape.

All this scared the little boy, who sobbed loudly, saying, ‘Go away, Kakima.’

After a long time, Kadambini was now feeling as though she had not died –  the familiar house, the boy, her love for him, all of it was as alive as they had ever been, she could sense no gap, no gulf. At her friend’s house she had felt that her childhood friend had died but in the boy’s room she realized that nothing of his aunt had died.

‘Why are you afraid of me, didi?’ she pleaded. ‘Look at me, I’m just as I always was.’

The lady of the house could stay on her feet no longer; she fainted in a heap on the floor.

Informed by his sister, Sharadashankar-babu appeared personally in the ladies’ chambers. His palms joined in supplication, he said, ‘Is this fair, Chhotobouma? Satish is my only male heir, why must you cast your eye on him? Are we not your family? Ever since you went he has been wasting

away, his illness won’t leave him, he calls for you all the time. Since you have left the world, you must cut the strings now. We will perform your last rites suitably.’

Kadambini could take it no longer; she cried out frantically, ‘But I am not dead, I am not dead. How do I convince all of you I am not dead? Look, I am alive.’

Seizing the metal bowl from the floor, she struck herself on the forehead with it and her forehead began to bleed immediately.

‘Look, I am alive,’ she declared.

Sharadashankar was transfixed, like a statue. The little boy called out to him in fear. The two women who had fainted remained on the floor.

Shouting, ‘I am not dead, I am not dead, not dead,’ Kadambini left the room, climbed down the stairs and plunged into the pond behind the ladies’ chambers. Sharadashankar heard a splash from the room upstairs.

It rained incessantly all night and the next morning; the rain did not let up in the afternoon either. Kadambari died to prove that she had not died.

SARAT CHANDRA CHATTOPADHYAY

Paradise of the Wretched

Thakurdas Mukherjee’s aged wife died after a seven- day fever. Old Mukherjee’s rice business had made him a man of means. He had four sons and three daughters, the children had children of their own, and with the sons- and daughters-in-law, neighbours and servants all present, it was as though a festival had erupted. The entire village turned out for a glimpse of the grand final journey of the corpse. The dead woman’s daughters wept as they lined the soles of her feet with the traditional red altaa and put a thick layer of vermilion on her hairline to signal that she had died a married woman. Her daughters-in-law adorned her forehead with drops of sandalwood paste, dressed her in an expensive sari and touched her feet in reverence for the last time. The profusion of flowers, fragrances and garlands did not make it look like an occasion of grief – it was as though, after fifty years, the lady of the house was on her way once more to her husband’s home. Old Mukherjee bade farewell for the last time to his lifelong companion with a tranquil expression, wiped away a few tears out of sight of everyone, and consoled his daughters and daughters-in-law. Rending the morning skies with the invocations to the gods that normally accompany a dead person’s final journey, the entire village walked alongside the funeral procession.

One more living being joined the group, though from a distance. This was young Kangali’s mother. She was on her way to the market to sell a handful of eggplants she had picked from the yard in front of her hut, but the sight she saw made her stop abruptly. The market was forgotten, and so were the eggplants –  wiping her eyes, she followed the crowd to

the crematorium. It stood in a corner of the village, by the river. All that was needed for the funeral pyre had been collected there already. Belonging as she did to a lower caste, Kangali’s mother did not dare go closer. Standing at a slight distance behind a high mound of earth, she watched the last rites with great interest and attention. When the body was placed on the wide and generous pyre, she found the view of the red altaa-lined soles beautiful, and had the urge to run up and smear a little bit of the altaa on her own forehead. Her eyes streamed with tears when the son lit the pyre, accompanied by invocations to the divine in a chorus of voices. In her head she repeated: you are fortunate, you are going to heaven –  bless me so that I too may have Kangali as the one who lights my pyre.

Having one’s son light one’s pyre. No small achievement. This leaving of one’s sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, servants, maids, family – a shining family – behind and ascending to heaven made Kangali’s mother’s breast swell with pride; she seemed unable to measure the extent of this good fortune. A profusion of smoke from the freshly lit pyre curled upwards, casting a blue shadow –  Kangali’s mother clearly saw a small chariot in its coils. Someone was sitting in it, not quite identifiable, but there was vermilion in the parting of her hair, and the soles of her feet were lined in red. Kangali’s mother gazed skywards tearfully. A boy of fourteen or fifteen tugged on the end of her sari.

‘What are you doing here, ma, aren’t you going to cook?’

Startled, she looked at Kangali. ‘I will.’ Pointing upwards, she said, ‘Look, there she is, going to heaven.’

The boy stared at the sky in surprise. ‘What?’ After a brief inspection, he said, ‘Are you mad? It’s nothing but smoke.’ Angrily he said, ‘It’s past noon, aren’t I supposed to be hungry?’ Then, spotting the tears in his mother’s eyes, he said, ‘Some upper-caste Brahmin woman has died, what are you crying so much for?’

Kangali’s mother finally came to her senses. She was embarrassed at weeping for someone else in the crematorium. In fact, fearing this might bring bad luck upon her son, she even tried to wipe her eyes and smile.

‘Why should I be crying, the smoke got in my eyes, that’s all.’

‘Hah – the smoke got in my eyes, that’s all. You were crying.’

She didn’t protest. Taking her son by the hand, she went down to the waterline to give him a bath, and took one herself too. She was not fortunate enough to witness the completion of the rites. 2

When parents name their children, god does not content himself only with laughing in the sky, but also protests vehemently. Which is why their names taunt them all their lives. However, Kangali’s mother had only a short life story, and it had escaped the creator’s joke. Her own mother had died in childbirth, leading her angry father to name her Awbhagi, to remind her that she had brought misfortune upon them. With her mother dead, and her father spending his days fishing in rivers to earn a living, no one took care of her. It was a matter of great astonishment that little Awbhagi still succeeded in growing up and becoming Kangali’s mother. The man she was married to was named Roshik Bagh, who, true to his surname denoting tiger, had another tigress. With her he shifted to another village, leaving behind Awbhagi with her misfortune and her young son Kangali, whose name signified destitution.

Today the same Kangali had turned fourteen. He had begun to learn cane-weaving, and Awbhagi was now hoping that after another year of battling misfortune their suffering would cease. Only the one who had allotted this suffering to them knew the extent of it.

Returning from the pond after washing his hands, Kangali found his mother covering the leftovers on his plate with an earthen bowl.

‘Aren’t you going to eat, ma?’ he asked in surprise.

‘It’s too late to eat, I have no appetite.’

‘No appetite? I don’t believe it. Show me the pot.’

Kangali’s mother had used this ruse many times to fool her son. He insisted on inspecting the pot, which did in fact have only enough rice for one person. Now he sat down contentedly in his mother’s lap. Boys of his age did not often do such things, but because he had been ill for a long time he had not had the opportunity to wander away from his mother’s arms and make friends with boys and girls of his age. Her lap had been his playground. Putting his arm round her, he touched her face with his,

only to jump up in alarm. ‘You have a fever, ma, why did you have to stand under the sun to watch the dead body being burnt? And then why did you have to bathe? Is a dead body being burnt something that . . .’

His mother clamped her hand on his mouth at once. ‘You must never say dead body, it’s a sin. A chaste and pure woman has gone to heaven in a chariot.’

‘The things you say, ma,’ Kangali said sceptically. ‘As if anyone goes to heaven in a chariot.’

‘I saw for myself, Kangali,’ said his mother, ‘she was seated in a chariot. Everyone saw her red-lined feet.’

‘Everyone?’

‘Every single person.’

Leaning back against her, Kangali began to ponder over this. He was accustomed to believing everything his mother told him – from childhood he had learnt to believe her –  and if she was saying everyone had seen it for themselves, there was nothing more to doubt. A little later he said, speaking slowly, ‘Then you’ll go to heaven too? The other day Bindi’s mother was telling Rakhal’s aunt, there’s no one here as chaste and pure as Kangali’s mother.’

Kangali’s mother was silent. Kangali continued as slowly as before, ‘So many people begged you to marry them when baba left you. But you said no, all my trials will be over once Kangali grows up, why should I marry again? Where would I have been today if you’d married again, ma? I might have starved to death.’

His mother folded him to her bosom. A great many people had in fact advised her to get married, and when she didn’t agree in any circumstances, they had given her a good deal of trouble too. The recollection brought tears to Awbhagi’s eyes again. Her son wiped them away, saying, ‘Do you want to lie down?’

His mother was silent. Kangali laid out the mat, put a thin quilt on it, fetched a small pillow and drew his mother towards the bed he had made. ‘No need to go to work today, Kangali,’ she said.

Kangali found the proposition most attractive, but said, ‘Then they won’t pay me the day’s wages, ma.’

‘Doesn’t matter, let me tell you a story.’

Kangali needed no further inducement. He nestled close to his mother

at once, and said, ‘Go on, then.’ Awbhagi began the story about the prince, the general’s son and the flying horse.

She had heard and told this story many times. But within moments there was neither a prince nor a general’s son –  she told a story that she had not heard from anyone else, it was her own creation. The more her fever rose, the faster did the heated blood swirl in her head, and the more she wove newer and ever newer tales. There was no ceasing, no pause even – Kangali’s frail body thrilled with every episode and in fear, wonder and delight he put his arms round his mother’s neck and tried to nestle into her breast.

Daylight waned outside, the sun set, the dark shadows of evening grew deeper and spread across the earth, but no lamp was lit inside, no one rose to perform the last task of the day, only the mother’s humming poured music into the silent son’s ears in the intense darkness. It was the story of the funeral procession and the crematorium. Of the chariot, the red-lined feet and the journey to heaven. Of how the grieving husband said goodbye in tears after touching his dead wife’s forehead with his feet, and then the son lighting the funeral pyre.

‘Those were not flames, Kangali, those were god himself. And the smoke spreading across the sky was not smoke but the chariot to heaven. Kangali!’

‘What, ma?’

‘I too will go to heaven if you are the one who lights my pyre.’

‘Don’t say these things,’ said Kangali, his voice barely audible.

His mother probably did not hear him. Through her fevered breathing she said, ‘No one can hate me then for being low-caste, no one can talk about my misfortune. When my son lights my pyre the chariot to heaven will have no choice but to take me.’

Pressing his face to hers, Kangali said, ‘Don’t say these things, ma, you’re frightening me.’

His mother said, ‘And Kangali, can you fetch your father so he can touch my head with his feet the same way to say farewell. The same altaa on my soles, vermilion in my hair –  but who will do all this? You will, won’t you, Kangali, you’re my son and my daughter, you’re my everything.’ She held her son close.

The final act in the drama of Awbhagi’s life was about to end. Its extent was brief. Not even thirty years may have passed, and the end was ordinary too. There was no doctor in this village, he lived in another one. Kangali went to him with entreaties, wept at his feet and finally pawned a vessel to give him a fee of one rupee. He did not visit the patient to examine her, only prescribing three or four pills, which required an array of accompaniments to be taken alongside. Kangali’s mother was unhappy with her son. ‘Why did you have to pawn the vessel without asking me?’ Accepting the pills, she touched her forehead with them reverently before throwing them into the burning oven. ‘If I have to get well I will, no one in our clan has ever taken pills.’

Two or three days passed this way. The neighbours paid visits, everyone recommended their own version of guaranteed cures and went away. When young Kangali grew increasingly flustered, his mother drew him close and said, ‘The doctor’s pills didn’t work, and you think these treatments will? I’ll recover on my own.’

‘You didn’t take the pills, ma, you threw them into the oven,’ Kangali said through his tears. ‘How can anyone get better this way?’

‘I’ll get well on my own. Can you boil some rice for yourself? I want to watch you eat.’

Kangali busied himself trying to make rice for the first time with great ineptitude. He could neither drain the starch nor get the rice out of the pot properly. The oven refused to be lit correctly – water fell into it, sending up plumes of smoke. Rice grains spilt on the floor, and his mother’s eyes filled with tears. She tried to get to her feet but fell back in bed. After her son had eaten she asked him to come closer and began giving him instructions, but her voice, already faint, faded altogether, and all she could do was weep continuously.

Ishwar the barber knew how to check the pulse. The next morning he placed his fingertips on the patient’s wrist and then looked grave, sighed, shook his head and left. Kangali’s mother deciphered the message, but she felt no fear. When everyone had left she told her son, ‘Can you fetch him?’

‘Fetch whom, ma?’

‘You know, the one who’s gone to the other village.’

Kangali understood. ‘Father, you mean?’

Awbhagi was silent.

‘Why will he come, ma?’ Kangali asked.

Awbhagi was doubtful herself, but she said softly, ‘Tell him ma only wants to pay her respects to him one last time.’ As Kangali made to go at once, she gripped his arm and said, ‘Tell him ma’s going, let him see you cry.’ After a pause she said, ‘Get a little altaa from the barber’s wife on your way back. She’s very fond of me, she won’t say no.’

Many of the villagers were fond of her. Ever since his mother’s fever had set in, Kangali had heard her talk about these things many times. He set off, weeping. 4

Awbhagi was in a stupor by the time her husband Roshik did in fact turn up the next day. The shadow of death had fallen on her face, and her vision had completed its task on this earth and left for an unknown destination. ‘Baba is here, ma,’ Kangali said, sobbing, ‘didn’t you want to touch his feet?’

Perhaps his mother understood, or perhaps she didn’t, or maybe her deep-rooted desire knocked on the doors of her consciousness like an ancient tradition. Bound for death, she held out her hand.

Roshik stood there, bewildered. That someone could actually seek to touch his feet in reverence was beyond his imagination. Bindi’s aunt, who was present, said, ‘Go on, let her.’

Roshik took a step forward. He had given no love to his wife in her lifetime, no attention or care, but now he burst into tears as he let her touch his feet.

‘Why did such a chaste and pure woman have to be born into a low caste like ours?’ said Rakhal’s mother. ‘Send her on her way now, it’s as though she gave up her life with the expectation that Kangali will light the pyre.’

I cannot tell what the god presiding over Awbhagi’s misfortunes out of sight of everyone made of this, but to young Kangali it was like an arrow to the heart.

The day passed and the night too, but Kangali’s mother did not wait for the morning to arrive. Who knows whether there are arrangements for someone from such a low caste to be taken to heaven in a chariot, or whether they have to set off on foot before dawn, but it was clear that she had left this world before the sun had risen.

There was a wood apple tree in the yard. Roshik had barely plunged a borrowed axe into its trunk when the feudal landlord’s guard ran up and slapped him resoundingly. Snatching the axe away, he said, ‘Is this your father’s tree, you bastard?’

Roshik caressed his cheek, and Kangali said tearfully, ‘My mother planted this tree, why did you slap my father?’

Uttering an expletive, the guard tried to slap him too, but decided not to as it would mean becoming unclean, since Kangali had been touching his dead mother all this while. A crowd gathered because of the uproar, but no one denied that Roshik had not been wise in attempting to chop the tree without seeking permission. They also pleaded with the guard to allow him to do it. For Kangali had earnestly expressed Awbhagi’s last wish to everyone who had been to see her.

The guard was not one to melt. Gesturing with his hands and face, he informed the gathering that he was not going to be taken in by their cleverness.

The feudal landlord was not a local. He did have an office in the village, however, presided over by the bill-collector Adhar Roy. While everyone pleaded in vain with the guard, Kangali raced off to the office. He had heard it said that guards took bribes, and was convinced that if only he could convey news of such unwarranted injustice to the powers that be, steps would be taken. How green behind the ears he was! He had no familiarity with feudal landlords and their employees. Confused and dazed by grief and desperation after losing his mother, he went directly up to where Adhar Roy had just emerged for a frugal meal on completing his prayers.

‘Who are you?’ Adhar Roy asked in astonishment and anger.

‘I am Kangali. Your guard slapped my father.’

‘Serves him right. Did the swine not pay his tax?’

‘No sir,’ said Kangali, ‘he was chopping a tree, my mother has died . .’ He could not hold back his tears.

Adhar was irked at all this crying so early in the morning. The fellow had just touched a dead body, what if he touched something here? ‘Go downstairs if your mother’s died,’ he rebuked Kangali. ‘Someone purify this place with some cow dung and water. What caste are you?’

Going downstairs, Kangali revealed his caste fearfully.

‘That’s a low caste,’ said Adhar. ‘What do you need wood to burn the body for?’

Kangali said, ‘Ma told me to light her pyre. Ask anyone if you don’t believe me, everyone heard.’ He was about to burst into tears on recalling his mother’s plea.

‘Bring five rupees for the tree if you want a pyre for your mother,’ said Adhar. ‘Can you afford it?’

Kangali knew this was impossible. He had seen for himself that Bindi’s aunt had taken his brass plate to pawn it for a rupee so that a shawl could be bought for the last rites. ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head.

Contorting his face, Adhar said, ‘If you can’t pay, go bury your mother by the river. How dare your father take an axe to someone else’s tree, the swine?’

‘We planted the tree in our own yard,’ said Kangali. ‘My mother did it herself.’

‘Planted it yourself! Someone throw him out.’

Someone appeared and threw him out, uttering words that only the employees of feudal landlords could summon to their tongues.

Kangali rose to his feet, slapping the dust off his body, and left slowly. He could not for the life of him understand why he had been beaten up and for what crime. The bill-collector’s dispassionate expression showed no change. He would not have got this job if it had. ‘Check whether the scoundrel’s taxes are overdue, Paresh,’ he said. ‘If they are, one of his fishing nets should be confiscated, the bastard might run away.’

There was just a day to go to the ritual post-death ceremony at the Mukherjees’. The arrangements were worthy of the departed housewife. Aged Thakurdas Mukherjee was on his way back after supervising everything personally when Kangali confronted him, saying, ‘My mother has died.’

‘Who are you? What do you want?’

‘I’m Kangali. Ma said to light her pyre.’

‘Then do it.’

Word had spread already –  someone said, ‘He probably wants a tree’, and explained everything.

Surprised and annoyed, Mukherjee said, ‘What demands! I need all the wood I can get for the ceremonies. Get out of here, you won’t get anything from me.’ He left.

The Brahmin priest sitting nearby and making a list of the items needed for the rituals said, ‘Who burns bodies in your caste? Just do the formalities and bury her by the river.’

Thakurdas Mukherjee’s son was passing, looking extremely busy. Listening to the exchange, he said, ‘Have you noticed how they all want to be high-caste these days.’ He dashed off in pursuit of some important work.

Kangali begged and pleaded no more. His experiences during the past two hours seemed to have aged him several years. He went back in silence to where his dead mother was lying.

A hole was dug by the river and Awbhagi was laid down in it. Rakhal’s mother lit a few hay stalks, put them in Kangali’s hand, and guided his hand to touch his mother’s face with the flame before throwing the stalks away. Then the people present filled the hole to erase all remaining signs of Kangali’s mother’s existence.

Everyone went back to whatever they were doing. Kangali alone sat there, gazing unblinkingly at the wisps of smoke from the burning stalks of hay spiralling up into the sky.

PARASHURAM

The Philosopher’s Stone

Paresh-babu had found a philosopher’s stone. When and where, how it got there, or whether there are more is none of your business. Be quiet and listen.

A middle-aged, middle-class man, Paresh-babu occupied ancestral property, and was a lawyer by profession. His earnings were nothing to write home about; they barely covered his household expenses. He picked up a pebble from the road on his way back home one day. Not that he had recognized it for what it was, but because it looked unusual he put it in his pocket. When he was home he took the key to his ground-floor office out of his pocket and discovered it was yellow. Paresh-babu wondered how the iron key had turned to brass. Maybe the original was lost, and his wife had had a duplicate made with brass, which he hadn’t noticed all these days.

Entering, Paresh-babu emptied his pockets on the desk, keeping only his wallet, and climbed upstairs. The key was forgotten. After some food and an hour of rest, he went back downstairs to go over some work documents, and switched on the light. The first thing that caught his eye was the stone. A nice, rounded, shiny pebble. He would give it to his youngest son the next morning to play marbles with. Paresh-babu deposited it in a drawer that held his scissors, knife, notepaper, envelopes and other stationery. How strange, the scissors and knife turned yellow at once. Paresh-babu touched his inkpot with the stone, but there was no change in the glass. Then he held the stone against a lead paperweight, which turned yellow and twice as heavy. With a trembling voice Paresh-babu called for the manservant and said, ‘Haria, fetch my watch from upstairs.’ Haria brought his cheap nickel watch with a leather strap. As soon as

Paresh-babu touched them with the stone, the watch and the buckles all turned to gold. The watch stopped working, for the spring had turned to gold and was not strong enough any more.

Paresh-babu was in a state of bewilderment for some time. Gradually he realized that he had found that extremely rare object, a philosopher’s stone, which turned all metal to gold on contact. Joining his palms together in prayer and raising them to this forehead repeatedly, he muttered, ‘Long live Ma Kali, why such kindness? You are the only true god, Hari, are you playing with me? I’m not dreaming, am I?’ Paresh-babu delivered an almighty pinch to his left arm, but still he didn’t wake up. Not a dream, then. His head began to reel, his heart began thumping loudly. Putting his head on his breast, he declaimed like the classical heroine Shakuntala, ‘Be quiet my beating heart. If you give up on me now, who is going to enjoy this enormous wealth granted by the gods?’ He had heard of a man who had leapt so high in the air with elation after winning four lakh rupees in a lottery that his head had struck the rafters and been split open. Paresh-babu clutched his own head with both his hands, just in case he leapt as well.

Like extreme grief, one also grows accustomed to extreme joy. Paresh-babu returned to his senses and began to reflect on what he should do now. It was best for the news not to get out suddenly; you never know which of your enemies might put a spanner in the works. For now only his wife Giribala would be told, although women could never keep a secret. Pareshbabu went upstairs and broke the news to his wife slowly instead of springing it as a surprise, and, making her swear on the 3 million gods and goddesses, warned her not to let it out.

But although Paresh-babu had cautioned his wife, he lost control personally. Touching an iron beam beneath the bedroom roof with the philosopher’s stone softened it because it was turned into gold, making the ceiling cave in. He converted all the pots and pans in the house to gold. Anyone who saw them wondered why they had been gilded. Pareshbabu told them off unceremoniously, ‘Don’t bother me, what business is it of yours?’ Fed up with being interrogated, he more or less stopped socializing, and his clients decided he had gone mad.

After this Paresh-babu moved slowly, for haste could spell danger. He

sold some of the gold, deposited part of the takings in the bank, and bought shares with the rest. He built a colossal house and a factory on twelve acres of land in Ballygunge. There was no shortage of bricks, cement or iron, since it was child’s play for him to win over the authorities. Coming across a pile of rusted car parts in disuse, he asked, ‘How much?’ The owner was devoid of greed and said, ‘Take it all, sir, it’s garbage, I can’t pay for transport though.’ Paresh-babu proceeded to gather fifteen or twenty kilos of the scrap every day. All he had to do in his private chamber was to touch it all with his philosopher’s stone to create gold instantly. Ten Gurkha security men and five bulldogs guarded the factory premises, where no one was allowed in without Paresh-babu’s orders.

Making and selling gold was the easiest of businesses, but producing it on a large scale was not possible alone. Paresh-babu put an advertisement in the papers, and, rejecting a mass of applications, appointed Priyotosh Henry Biswas, who had just acquired an MS c degree, at 150 rupees a month. Priyotosh had no family to speak of, and moved into Paresh-babu’s factory. He did not take more than an hour to clear his bowels, bathe, and eat his meals. He slept for seven hours, worked at the factory for eight, and spent the remaining eight hours writing long poems and love letters addressed to Hindola Majumdar, his classmate from college, besides smoking and drinking tea at frequent intervals. He was a fine young man who did not spend time in the company of others, did not go to church on Sundays, displayed no curiosity about anything, and never asked where all this gold was coming from. Paresh-babu considered himself in possession of a second gem in addition to the philosopher’s stone in the form of his new recruit. Priyotosh melted the gold down in large moulds using electric bellows and made thick bars which Paresh-babu sold to a syndicate of Marwari businessmen, fattening his bank balance. There was no limit now to his wife’s wealth, she was in fact in physical pain from all the jewellery she used to wear, and was quite sick of gold. Giribala had discarded all of it and had switched to saffron robes.

Still, Paresh-babu’s activities didn’t stay under wraps very long. The police began to investigate him on the Bengal government’s orders. But they succumbed easily, for they had not yet mastered the policies of the ideal state; all they needed to be mollified were a few grams of gold. Scientists

gave up food and drink and began to speculate. Had they been born two centuries ago, they would have realized that Paresh-babu had found a philosopher’s stone. But there was no room for such objects in modern science, which was why they concluded that he had put together a machine that could split the atom, and was making gold by reassembling the fragments, just like making a quilt from pieces of cloth. The trouble was that Paresh-babu never answered letters, and Priyotosh was nothing but an idiot who only said when pressed, ‘I merely melt the gold, I have no idea where it comes from.’ Scientists abroad had at first dismissed the whole thing as a rumour, but eventually they became active too.

Flustered by the advice of specialists, the government of India decided that Paresh-babu was a dangerous person, but there was nothing they could do about it, since he had not done anything illegal. There was a proposal to arrest him and seize his factory, but various powerful people from India and abroad came in the way. The ambassadors of Britain, France, America, Russia and other nations kept a vigilant but benevolent eye on him, inviting him repeatedly to dinner. Paresh-babu went, ate quietly, and said yes and no sometimes, but no one could worm his secret out of him, not even after plying him with champagne. ‘For the good of the nation let a few of us know your secret,’ some Congress leaders in Bengal suggested. ‘Don’t even think of listening to anyone,’ the Communists told him, ‘just go on with what you’re doing, the world will benefit.’

The ranks of friends, relatives and flatterers kept swelling, with Pareshbabu even handing out suitable rewards, but still no one was happy. As for his enemies, they were stunned into silence. Despite his expanded wealth, he did not lead an ostentatious life, and his wife was too oldfashioned to know how to squander money. Still, Paresh-babu was now known all over the world. He was reputed to be capable of supporting half a dozen kings of the princely states financially. What he said and ate and wore was published in the newspapers of Europe and America in bold type. Love letters had begun to pour in from home and abroad. Beautiful women sent photographs and catalogues of virtues, writing, ‘Dearest sir, you may retain your old wife, we have no objection. You are a liberal Hindu, purify me and enrol me in your harem, or else I shall consume poison.’ Letters like these arrived in large numbers every day, and Giribala

snatched them out of his hand. She engaged a foreigner as her secretary to read out translations of the letters and send replies according to her orders. Giribala said many harsh things out of anger, but the foreigner was under-educated, and wrote the same thing in every letter: damn you. In other words, you wretched woman, can’t you find a rope to hang yourself with? Ten renowned scientists wrote to Paresh-babu to tell him that if he revealed the secret behind the gold they would try to ensure that he received the Nobel Prizes in Physics, Chemistry and Peace all at the same time. Assuming this too was a love letter, Paresh-babu’s wife sent the same reply through her secretary: damn you.

Paresh-babu kept pushing the price of gold down: from 100 rupees per ten grams it had dropped to seven. The British government had bought gold cheap and used it to repay its dollar loans to America. The American government was furious, but it could not find grounds to object. Britain had wanted to repay its pound sterling loan to India down to the last penny in the same way, but the prime minister of the country said, ‘We lent you neither gold nor dollars, we supplied material during the war, you have to repay us with the same material.’

Unable to find a solution, the mavens of economics and politics were frantic with worry. If it had been one of the three older cosmological periods of the Hindu calendar, they could have taken the ascetic’s route to secure the help of one of the top gods and teach Paresh-babu a lesson. But there was no scope for this in the modern age. Some experts were advocating the use of platinum or silver standards, but others argued, no, those might be manufactured cheaply too, radium or uranium would be best, or go back to the barter system of yore.

Churchill could not be restrained any more. Flying into a rage, he said, ‘We will not allow the Commonwealth to be destroyed, we won’t waste time griping to the United Nations either. Let British rule be re-established in India, let our soldiers capture this Paresh, let him be kept under confinement on the Isle of Wight. Let him produce as much gold there as he likes, but all of it will belong to the British Empire, we will decide how to distribute it.’

George Bernard Shaw said, ‘Gold is a useless metal, it cannot be used to make ploughs or sickles or axes or boilers. Paresh has done well to

destroy its undeserved reputation. He should now try to make gold as strong as steel. As soon as I am given a gold razor I will start shaving.’

A Russian spokesperson wrote to Paresh-babu, ‘We extend a warm invitation to you to reside in our country, sir, we are sure you will enjoy it. There is no discrimination between whites and blacks here, we will make you the apple of our eye. You have received a miraculous gift, but, forgive me for saying so, you are not particularly intelligent. You know how to make gold, but not how to capitalize on it. We will teach you. Should you harbour political ambitions, you will be made the president of the Soviet Union. We will allot a magnificent mansion to you on a hundred acres of land in Moscow. And if it is privacy you seek, you can live in Siberia; we will give you an entire city. A wonderful land, which your ancient texts have named North Kuru.’ Giribala treated this missive as a love letter too and gave the same reply. Damn you.

Paresh-babu lowered the price of gold to where it now cost forty-five paise per ten grams. The amount of gold mined around the world every year was about 750,000 kilograms. Right now Paresh-babu was single-handedly releasing five times that quantity every year. The gold standard had gone to hell. There was great inflation in every country, currency notes and coins had become useless trifles. Even with their wages and salaries increased greatly, everyone was in a sorry plight. Prices were sky-high and no one could afford anything.

Ten people each from different groups had laid themselves down outside Paresh-babu’s front gate with a vow to fast unto death. From time to time he received anonymous letters –  you’re an enemy of the world, we will murder you. On his part, Paresh-babu had lost his taste for wealth. Giribala wept all the time, saying, ‘What’s the use of all these riches if we cannot be at peace? Get rid of that horrible stone, discard the gold in the river, let’s give up everything here and go live in Kashi.’

Paresh-babu made up his mind, and informed Priyotosh of the secret behind the gold the next morning.

Priyotosh was unmoved. Handing him the philosopher’s stone, Pareshbabu told him, ‘Destroy this at once. Burn it, melt it with acid, or use any other method.’

‘Righto,’ said Priyotosh.

In the afternoon one of the security guards ran up to Paresh-babu and said, ‘Come quick, sir, Biswas sahib has gone mad, he’s asking for you.’ Paresh-babu rushed off to find Priyotosh lying on his bed, weeping. ‘What’s the matter?’ Paresh-babu asked. ‘Read this letter, sir,’ Priyotosh answered.

Paresh-babu read:

My Priyo, my dearest, goodbye. My father is not willing, he has several objections. You have no prospects, you live in someone else’s house, you make only 150 a month, and to top it all you are a Christian and a year younger than me. This marriage is impossible, he said. Let me give you some more news. Have you heard of Gunjan Ghosh? A fine singer, handsome, curly hair. Makes 600 a month at the civil supply office, the only son of a father who has apparently made millions from his contractor’s business. My wedding has been arranged with this Gunjan. Don’t be upset, my darling. You know Bokul Mallik, don’t you? Three years junior to me, we were in Diocesan School at the same time. She can’t hold a candle to me, and yet she’s one in a thousand. Bag Bokul, you will be happy. This is my final love letter to you, dearest darling. From tomorrow you will be my brother, and I your affectionate elder sister. Yours, but only till today, Hindola.

Paresh-babu said, ‘What a fool you are. Hindola has left you voluntarily, this is exceedingly good news, why are you unhappy? You cannot pray in thanksgiving at the temple of course, you’d better light a couple of candles at the church. Now get out of bed, wash your face, come and have a cup of tea and breakfast. By the way, have you managed to dispose of the stone?’

In anguish Priyotosh said, ‘I have swallowed it, sir. This life is not worth preserving, the stone will go to the grave with me. Can you imagine so many years of love culminating in Gunjan Ghosh?’

‘What did you swallow it for?’ Paresh-babu asked in surprise. ‘Is it poisonous?’

‘I am not aware of its composition, sir,’ said Priyotosh, ‘but I think it is. Even if it is not, and I am not dead by tonight, I am determined to consume ten grams of potassium cyanide tomorrow morning, I have measured

it out. Don’t worry, sir, your stone will be buried with me and remain there till the day of judgement.’

‘What a madman!’ Paresh-babu said. ‘Abandon these horrifying notions, I shall try to get you married to Hindola. Her father Jogai Majumdar is a childhood friend of mine, a canny fellow if there ever was one. I will provide a handsome dowry, he may be ready to give his daughter’s hand to you once he knows this. But you’re a Christian . . .’

‘I’ll convert to Hinduism, sir.’

‘Now this is true love. Now come on, we have to see Dr Chatterjee.’

Paresh-babu informed the doctor that Priyotosh had absent-mindedly swallowed a pebble. An X-ray was taken the next day on the doctor’s advice. Scanning the plate, Dr Chatterjee said, ‘You don’t usually see such cases, I’m sending a report to The Lancet at once. Next to his ascending colon the young man has developed a small semicolon, which is where the stone is trapped. It might descend on its own. Let it stay as it is now, it won’t do any harm. If there are adverse symptoms I’ll operate on him and take it out.’

Jogai Majumdar hurried to meet Paresh-babu on receiving his letter. After their conversation he rushed back home and told his daughter, ‘Priyotosh has agreed to convert to Hinduism, Dola, you must marry him. No need to delay things, let his purification ceremony be conducted today, and the marriage tomorrow.’

Hindola was astonished. ‘What do you think you’re saying, baba? Yesterday it was Gunjan Ghosh, and today it’s Priyotosh? Look, Gunjan has given me a diamond ring, how do you suppose he’ll feel? You’ve given him your word, I’ve given him mine, how can we go back on it? How can Priyotosh match Gunjan? There’s simply no comparison.’

‘You think you know everything,’ said Jogai-babu. ‘Priyotosh has a goldmine in his stomach now. It will come out one day or another, and when it does the philosopher’s stone will be yours. Paresh-babu won’t take it back, he has given it for Priyotosh’s dowry. Give that diamond ring back, Priyotosh can get thousands like that. Can your Ghosh and his contractor father be compared to a groom like this? No more arguments, it’s Priyotosh you must marry.’

Her voice soaked in tears, Hindola sobbed, ‘It was him I loved. But he’s such a fool.’

‘Why would he want to marry you if he’s not a fool?’ said Jogai-babu. ‘With a philosopher’s stone in his stomach he can marry the most beautiful woman in the world.’

Priyotosh Henry Biswas harboured no regrets. His purification ceremony was conducted, a ritual fire was lit with a kilogram of vegetable clarified butter, five upper-caste Brahmins were served a sumptuous meal. And then Hindola and Priyotosh were wedded at an auspicious moment. But Jogai-babu’s and his daughter’s wishes were not fulfilled, for the stone did not drop. Sometime later, there was a strange phenomenon – all the gold Paresh-babu had created began to lose its sheen, and within a month all of it turned back to iron.

There was a simple explanation. As everyone knows, just as unrequited love leads to failing health, being lucky in love revives it. All the organs function efficiently, improving metabolism. It had taken Priyotosh only a month to grind down the pebble; not even a fragment was to be seen in an X-ray. And with the dissolution of the stone, all of Paresh-babu’s gold had reverted to its original form.

Hindola and her father were furious. ‘Priyotosh is a liar and cheat,’ they said. They had trusted this fraud, they complained, and wasted their time with this Christian garbage out of sheer hope. But Priyotosh was fortified mentally after digesting the philosopher’s stone. He had become more intelligent, and ignored his wife’s and father-in-law’s verbal assaults. He would not consume cyanide even if Hindola threatened to divorce him. He had realized that St Francis and Ramakrishna Paramhansa had got it right – women and wealth were both worthless, nothing compared to iron. He now ran Paresh-babu’s iron factory, casting fifty tons of various products every day, and was enjoying life to the full.

BIBHUTIBHUSHAN BANDYOPADHYAY

Drobomoyee’s Sojourn in Kashi

For two days they packed. Only three families lived here – usually none of them spoke to the other two. The area was surrounded by clumps of false white teaks, tamarind trees, bamboo groves and very old orchards of mango and jackfruit. There was a dense growth of trees around Drobomoyee’s house, which meant the sunlight never entered it. There was a pond in front, overflowing in the rainy season, with the monotonous croaking of frogs in the daytime and the buzzing of mosquitoes at night.

Drobomoyee’s grandson said, ‘Is there anything at home you can eat, or should I get something?’

Her reply was faint, for she had been suffering from malaria for two months; an intermittent fever had returned on alternate days by the clock in the afternoon. Drobomoyee slipped under her ancient quilts, groaned piteously and became delirious every time.

A woman from one of the neighbouring houses, universally addressed as Naw-thakrun, went up to her window and asked, ‘What’s the matter, do you have a fever?’

‘I want to die. This fever, all the time. Oh god how my arms and legs ache. It won’t even let me get to my feet, what is this illness?’ Then she would add an entreaty. ‘Even with these quilts I feel so cold, will you get that old mattress there and put it on me, Naw-bou?’

‘Should I press it down on you, didi?’

‘Do, do, press hard . . . I think . . . this . . . is the end . . .’

‘Don’t say that, don’t be afraid. Tebu will be here as soon as the letter reaches him, Kanu will come, Bindey will come – may your grandsons live long, didi, wonderful boys all of them, what do you have to worry about?’

‘No . . one . . looks after . . me . .’

‘Of course they will, didi, of course they will. Don’t speak, rest quietly.’

‘My . . . cow . . . in the . . . northern . . . field . . .’

‘Where did you leave her?’

‘Next to . . . milkman Jotey’s . . . field . . .’

‘Never mind, I’ll bring her home. My cow’s there too. Rest.’ Naw-thakrun returned to the window half an hour later to ask, ‘Has the shivering stopped, didi?’

A faint voice came from beneath the pile of torn quilts and sheets, ‘But my cow . . .’

‘Don’t worry, I’ve brought her back. Has the shivering stopped?’

‘Hmm.’

Every year Drobomoyee suffered from malaria through the rainy season. Her eldest grandson, Srishchandra aka Tebu, worked at the Gun and Shell factory in Ichhapur. The middle one was an employee of Eastern Bengal Railway in Pakshi. The youngest one lived somewhere there too. Only the eldest grandson was married, with a son of his own. He had visited Drobomoyee with his family for the past five or six years, each time staying a week. His wife Manorama was from the urbanized district of Hooghly, she sniffed at everything. ‘House nothing, it’s just a ramshackle room with bamboo slips for walls. It’s such a jungle here you can see wild pigs in the daytime. And those mosquitoes! God, the mud. Is this place fit for humans?’ Manorama’s scimitar-like nose grew sharper and higher. Seven days later Drobomoyee had to allow her heart to be broken as her greatgrandson left. She could not contain her tears. To Naw-thakrun she said, ‘I cannot tell you how sweet he is . . .’

Unable to understand the desperate anticipation of many years now drowned in Drobomoyee’s uncontrollable weeping, the barren widow from next door was nonplussed. Perhaps Naw-thakrun told herself, ‘How she exaggerates everything!’

Naw-thakrun was not a relative of Drobomoyee’s, merely a neighbour. The two old women stopped talking to each other for an average of four months every year, refusing even to set eyes on one another. And yet, once they had made up, it was Naw-thakrun who did the most to look after Drobomoyee. When Drobomoyee couldn’t get out of bed because of fever, Naw-thakrun took care of her cow along with her own. She even brought

the ailing Drobomoyee some food sometimes, or at least peeped in on her through the window and comforted the sick woman.

But this time Drobomoyee was suffering more than usual. The fever began in mid-June and attacked her frequently. She grew progressively weaker, and everything tasted foul. For a month now she had been afflicted by an intermittent fever.

In the evening Drobomoyee kicked away her quilts and rose to her feet. The trembling had stopped, though the fever hadn’t receded yet –  there was a bitter coating on her tongue, her head felt heavy and her body numb.

‘Did you bring my cow back, Naw- bou?’ she called out to her neighbour.

Naw-thakrun answered after two or three attempts. ‘Who’s that, is that didi? You’re up?’

‘Did you bring my cow back from the fields?’

‘I did. Can’t you think of anything but the cow? Is the fever gone at last?’

‘It has. Where did you put the cow?’

‘In the cowshed. Mad to go on about the cow all the time . .’

There was a spot of kerosene oil in one of the earthen lamps. Drobomoyee lit it. Two birds were conversing on a hog plum tree. To Drobomoyee’s fevered brain the conversation seemed to go like this –

First bird: ‘Kutli kutli . . .’

Second bird: ‘Kya kya kya . . .’

First bird: ‘Kutli kutli . . .’

Second bird: ‘Kya kya kya . . .’

First bird: ‘Kutli kutli . . .’

Drobomoyee was irked. So monotonous. On and on they were going, it had been half an hour at least. Who wanted this on top of a headache? Stop, for heaven’s sake. How could she cope with man and beast harassing her together . . .

Drobomoyee went to the cowshed for a glimpse of Mungli, her cow, to calm herself down. She never ate till Mungli had eaten. Here she was in this desolate home of her husband’s in the wilderness, everyone had deserted her, some for distant lands and some for heaven. She had two sons, two daughters, several grandchildren – a large family, if only they had all lived together.